Mankind in Amnesia

Lecture before the Graduate Student Forum in Princeton,
December 6, 1967

This room is familiar to me; not all the faces are familiar. It was on
October 14, 1953 that I had the honor for the first time to speak at the
forum of the Graduate College. At that time and in this place I claimed
that should Jupiter be examined on emitting radio noises they would be
detected. Therefore, this room is good on my memory. My coming here that
time was after a period of eleven years of solitude in libraries. The
ancient world came alive before my eyesthe ancient world and the
domain of the sky. Everything was different from what I was taught. It
was not a peaceful world evolving through billions of years, it was not
a solar system, a family of planets serenely traveling on their orbits.
The past was of conflict, of cataclysm, perturbation and the solar system
was not a peaceful place.

Ten years ago, in 1957, the space age started. Since then, an entirely
new picture of the solar system evolved. The moon, a cemetery circling
the earthwhether there was at any time an abode of life, we dont
knowcovered by oceans of lava, pocked by craters, whether of collision
or eruption, a devastated world, is not inactive, nor cold to its coreit
is hot under its surface, it was bubbling only recently, it is even partly
self-illuminating. Mars surface proved to be moonlike, no abode
of life unless of micro-organisms, also a world perturbed, also emitting
more heat than expected. Venus was proved to be a real hell. The name
Lucifer for the morning star is fitting. Its surface is hot to an extent
that many metals must be moltenbismuth and zinc and tin and leadand
it is covered by a suspended envelope, 15 miles thick, 45 miles above
the surface of the planet, of dust and gases, and it rotates not as it
should according to the cosmological theories, but retrogradely and, surprisingly,
locked in its rotation with respect to the earth so that every time it
passes between the sun and the earth it turns the very same face to us.

We are not in the center of the universe, as people thought before Copernicus
and for a century after himbut we are at the optimal place in the
systemnot too close to the sun and not too far away from it. We
live on a planet that is protected; it is surrounded by a magnetosphere
that keeps most of the cosmic rays out; it is enveloped in an ionosphere
that protects us from the damaging ultra-violet rays coming from the sun.
It has an atmosphere, not like the moon which has none, or Mars that has
a very thin one. This atmosphere lets light go through. It is composed
of oxygen diluted in nitrogen so that we do not burn our lungs. We have
a plentiful supply of water, four-fifths of the planet is water, and most
of it is neither frozen nor in a vaporous state. We have life in the ocean,
we have life on ground, we have life in the air. So we are in the optimal
place, but it is a very fragile situation. Not because a new catastrophe
of cosmic origin is in store but because man himself may be the instrument
of destruction.

I started my work as psychoanalyst. For sixteen years I worked as a psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst in Palestinetoday Israel. And when I started my
present work, I was led by certain considerations, axiomatic in psychoanalysis.
Forgotten memories of a man need to be re-awakened and brought to the
surface, to the conscious mind in order to free the person of his irrational
behavior. Can we not approach racial memory, racial amnesia, and racial
fantasies, in the same way we approach earlier memories, the unconscious
mind and the dreams and fantasies of a single personality?

There is a phenomenon that traumatic experiences to which a human being
is subjected are forgotten, are erased from the conscious, but conserved
in his unconscious mind. This is one of the major contributions of Freud
to the psychology of the unconscious mind. The irrational behavior of
man comes from a traumatic experience in the past, that the person tries
not to know, to forget, not to be aware of, to explain away. All kinds
of phenomena come out of this. Criminal behavior, running away from reality,
suicidal urge—and we are today a society which is certainly irrational.

As historian and psychologist I felt a duty to continue on Freuds
path, from single individual to the entire human race, because the human
race forgot the traumatic experiences to which it was subjected, and only
very recently so. (I will read to you from the first page of the future
book, Mankind in Amnesia.)

Contorted figures
in discotheques till morning hours, self-immolating young nuns in blazing
robes in Vietnam, uncouth beatniks declaiming verse, racing cars overturning
in flames onto onlookers who came to witness disaster, assemblages of
co-eds in hallucinogenic leave from reality, crowds of negroes reducing
city-quarters to shambles, men in capsules revolving around the earth
in 90 minutes, next aiming at the moon. All this and much more is the
outward picture of mankind in dismay.

What if really the
unidentified flying objects are spying lenses produced in our atmosphere
by a remote control and we are under observation? If such were the case—it
is not—what picture do we present to an observer from another world?
Armies are crossing the ocean to spray with torch hose villagers and
with defoliant chemicals fields and forests. Affluence grew around the
crematoria where six million people were gassed and the last fat extracted
from their emaciated bodies and used for soap. One hundred thousand
men, women and children gather as onlookers at a public hanging in the
Congo. And derricks are prepared to dig a hole through the earth under
the ocean bottom.1

The Copernican revolution met with opposition because man does not like
to think that he is not in the center of the universe, and even more so
he does not like to think that he lives on a planet that travels, that
moves. The opposition to Darwin came because it was most unpleasant to
think, especially in the church-going England, that there is no distinction
in principle between man and animal, man with the soul and the soulless
animal, only in gradation. But the idea of Darwin that we are secure in
our future, that nothing will happen to this earth because nothing did
happen in the past, made him acceptable. Changes are small, infinitesimally
small, homeopathically small—Darwin in his private life was a homeopath.
At the very end of his Origin of Species he wrote that since there
is a direct line from pre-Cambrian life to our own time, there could not
have been any great catastrophes in the past and we can be certain there
will be none. But this was nothing less than psychological scotoma. Psychological
scotoma, like ophtalmological scotoma, is an inability to see. Darwin
saw through his own eyes on his travels in South America in the pampas
of Patagonia, on the plains of Brazil, in the Cordillera of Peru, immense
hecatombs of animals big and small, forms still extant and also extinct.
He wondered and wrote in his diary: But to destroy all these animals,
small and big, from Tierra del Fuego in South America to the Bering Strait
of North America, nothing less than shaking of the entire framework of
the world could suffice. Of the extinction of species he wrote,
also in Origin of Species, that it is the most amazing, unexplained,
and perplexing phenomenon. He built up a theory of which the main thesis
is that the geological record has gaps. On these gaps he built his work,
because without them there is no theory of evolution in the Darwinian
sense. The argument is ex silentio and is but absence of evidence.
Darwin uses the postulated large lacunae in the geological and paleontological
records to explain the perplexing accumulations of bones in numerous localities
by slow evolution and by slow extinction. But they are not explainable
that way, already because in so many assemblages bones were found heaped
together of animals from the polar circle, like arctic fox, polar bear
or seal, and from the tropical regions, like boa constrictor, crocodile
and ostrich, and from the depth of the ocean, all thrown together, and
not in one or two places, but in very many all over the world. Alfred
Wallace, who simultaneously with Darwin came to the same idea of evolution
by natural selection, described the Siwalik Hills at the foot of the Himalayas,
bursting with hundreds of miles of deposits of broken bones of animals
that do not belong together. Beyond the clerical circles Darwins
revolution was not met with what is usually described as great opposition.
The scientific world accepted him rather soon, rather from the beginning.
We are living in a peaceful world and nothing will happen to us. You can
invest your money in the stock exchange or in real estate. All is secure.
The sea and land will not change their borders.

If you dont have a Bible just stop at a motel and you find one
there. And there you will read if you open it twicethe chances are
better than fifty-fiftya description of some phenomena that are
certainly not peaceful. The foundations of the earth were discovered,
coal was falling from the sky, earth was trembling, hills were moving
into the sea, sea and land were changing places, mountains vomited lava
and were molten like wax. And this kind of pictures are found in the prophets
through the Psalms and also in the books of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers,
without end. Even fundamentalists read them as metaphors. Follow the description
the Dominican monks wrote down as told by the aborigines of this continent—I
quote it in Worlds in Collisionand imagine stones falling
from the sky with crashing noises and bitumen pouring down, and men trying
to go on the roofs, while the buildings collapse, or to climb the trees
which throw them away; imagine the Pacific Ocean rising like a towering
wall and approaching the continent, the entire land burning with a thousand
volcanoes; new mountains going up and the water carrying everything away.
This is not a vision: it is described in historical texts and folk traditions
and in epics of many races of the world. We dont like to think about
those things as real events. Already about the time of the first century
B. C. started the forgetfulness. In the Sibylline books or in the New
Testament many sentences tell of the expectations of Doomsdaya scene
taken from the experiences of the past. The phenomenon of the creeping-in
oblivion you can observe in the debate between the anti-clerical Lucretius
who understood the heritage of ages and the clerical Cicero who claimed
that the planets are gods. Nothing can happen to them and whoever claims
that at any time they can be at fault should be brought to court and for
a capital punishment. The Pythagorean secret teaching, the Stoic philosophy,
all the mysteries and various rites, all go back to those experiences,
in order to re-live them.

The human history, that starts with the invention of writing, is hardly
5,000 years old. Anyone of you who reached already the age of 25 lived
a full half percent of the recorded history. Or I can say, since I work
on my book, it passed already more than that. It is a short period to
remember and plentiful documentation is available, but the inability to
read, word for word, what is written by assuming metaphors where there
are no metaphors is a familiar psychological phenomenon of explaining
away or rationalizing.

A man who suffers complete amnesia does not remember anything from some
date on in the past. He may find himself in the street and he does not
know from what town he came, what is his name, whether he is married and
has children. He may look for psychiatric help or he may live in a kind
of incognito, marry and run the chance of being detected as a bigamist.
The cause of the amnesia is in a traumatic experience, the memory of which
cannot be faced. Actually the very first case in the psychoanalytical
history, a common patient of Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, was a young
lady who had taken care of her father before he died and the experience
was so overwhelming for her that she developed a grave neurosis, though
not a complete amnesia, but complete as to the events of that period.

A second phenomenon, which Freud stressed again and again, is that a
person suffering of traumatic neurosis has the urge to repeat the experience,
to re-live it again; very often the person tries to change the roleshe
was the victim, he will make another the victim.

Now we are in a much progressed technological age. When I wrote my book
I did not expect that I will be here to read about the exploits in the
sky. As if man fixed all the problems here on earth he tries to reach
the planets. Everything here on earth is in turmoil. Mankind is in dismay.

The communistic world is split, the Semitic world is torn, so also the
Latin American and the African and the southeast Asian. Barriers are built
even on the Himalayas as if they are not barriers high enough by themselves.
This nation is a house divided. Black power, students unrest, disorganized
society, no more one nation.

It is very well to start the morning by finding your shoes, your textbooks
to come to classes and spend the day in classes or in the library, never
thinking that we are travelling in spaceso safe is the ship. Safe
it isthe planets came to a peaceful co-existence. But they still
show their wounds. They are still in feverMars, Venus and Jupiter
and the rest of them are hotter than theoretical would anticipate. Their
wounds and the fever are the consequence of their having participated
recently in theomachy, the battle of the gods. But today almost every
orbit is free of being interchained with another orbit. Nothing spectacular
from cosmic spaces is in store for us. But man himself achieved an immense
progress in technology. Sciences were proven all wrong. From Harold Ureys
theory of the moon to everything else that was spoken and said. Only recently
I visited that friendly library that is never closed here on the campus,
not even on Christmas night: the Fine Library of Physics. I pulled out
an astronomical text of a Harvard Professor published in 1946. I read
it, it was to me like reading Regiomontanus, the accepted astronomer who
had his books in scores of editions in the days of Copernicus, while the
second edition of De Revolutionibus took placeI do not exactly
know how much after the firsteighty years probably. Everything changed,
no more the same universe. Today you go into the astronomical building
library, a beautiful new place on this campus, and you find there many
magazines, and you open as many as you care: all discuss plasma and magnetic
fields and interrelations. Nothing of the kind was when I wrote my books.
But this is all due to the engineering progress. Is it not amazing to
send out a vehicle to overcome the gravitational pull, to aim it at a
planet that is hundreds of millions of miles away on its orbit, to know
exactly the day and the hour when it will reach the rendezvous point,
to scan the planet for its magnetic field, content of its atmosphere,
for its form whether it is spherical and on a battery of a few volts to
send back a code in many millions of dots of signals with large radio
antennas to catch these signals, to put them through computers, to interpret
them and to report thementirely the work of engineers. But before
all this, the progress in physics made possible the fission and fusion
to the atom. In twenty-five short years since the first successful experiment
in a courtyard of the University of Chicago, the means capable of destroying
the population of the world is already in the arsenal. This country alone
has more than necessary to destroy every city, every village in the world.
And on the other side of the ocean another great nation already developed
intercontinental missiles that can be thrown over the ocean and then in
a kind of saving, in separating itself into six heads destroy simultaneously
Boston, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Detroit. And
American feature an omnibus that may drop continually atomic
warheads traveling over Russia. The Russians will soon have artificial
satellites permanently in orbits and carrying atom heads that can be directed
by a signal to any place on earth. This is really what the ancients called
the sword of Damocles. The only population of intelligent being that is
left in this solar systemwhether there was or was not such population
on other planetsnothing is left there. We are alone, man is alone.
Contact a starbut the closest star is 4 ½ light years away.
Dont start a long distance telephone conversation by a Hello!
it will take 9 years to have a Hello! in reply. And this is
the closest and most probably it has not a single soul with whom to converse
there.

If we extinguish life on this planet or if we bring it down to the state
of barbarism, and a state of degeneration caused by radiation, it may
have been better if had not started at all. But this can happen because
we are victims of amnesia. We do not wish to know what happened in the
past. Some reader of mine wrote to me: Even the opposition that
you met, the vociferous and hostile opposition that had no precedent in
the history of science, was largely caused by the non-desire to know what
happened in the past and to realise the traumatic experience of the ancestors,
the evidence for which comes from all places, from planets, from the torn
continents and torn bottoms of the sea, from all ancient books, sacred
books and historical tablets in cuneiform, hieroglyphics on papyri.
And why I ask, did the ancient man worship the planets? And why Zeus,
Jupiter, was the main deity? And would you know if you go out, would all
of you know to identify among the stars the main deity, planet Jupiter,
worshiped by all ancient world? And why was the sun a secondary deity,
if everything was always as it is now? Why human sacrifices were brought
to planetary gods? And later to the cross and still later to the swastika?
A reader of mine, a psychologist in Jerusalem, wrote me: But anti-Semitism
has its first roots in the very fact that the Jewish people by some chance
had some survivals, when the sea was torn apart, the sea of Passage, and
they took upon themselves the yoke of moral rules and they praised themselves
that for their benefit the events took place that threw all the world
into shambles, not just Egypt. All the world suffered utter suffering,
and here a nation repeatedly claimed and blessed the God for these very
events. How not to hate, for the hatred comes from the sub-conscious mind.

The scientific world, though at small steps, approaches the view that
the Darwinian evolution is not the solution, that the world underwent
great catastrophes, that planetary bodies are not serene travelers through
eons of time on peaceful orbits.

So when I come here to speak about mankind in amnesia it is because I
realize the severity of the situation. Something of immense importance
is at stake. Before I finish I will read you a letter from one of my readers.
I feel that the ancients in myth, epic and sacred works have been
trying to tell us something about a problem that bothered them a great
deal. It appears fairly clear that our ancestors were trying to communicate
a deep fear, a terrible anxiety. They where talking about a problem that
was so terrible that the most drastic measures to group discipline and/or
self-repression were justified. It was a powerful fear. It is sometimes
suggested that the bible can directly be applied to modern life in that
all the ancients were really writing about was the problems of survival,
while avoiding neurosis, worries, unhappiness and so on. To me that approach
is very unconvincing, the god those people were writing about was terrifying.
In the Old Testament he is the god of wrath. And in the New Testament,
as Albert Schweitzer among others has pointed out, he is about to end
the world in Jesus life-time or shortly thereafter. He was dangerous and
violent. Rock, fire, flood, hurricane and similar weapons he used on those
he judged ill of. Thats what the ancients wrote, and I see no point
in trying to water it down. Thats what they meant. They were really
scared.

I brought you my message. Take it as an effort of a psychoanalyst to
apply the method of his art to racial memories and the racial subconscious
mind. You understand yourselves what is at stake. You should understand
also that coming here I did not wish to sound as a prophet of doom, and
I did not call you to mend your ways or to repent but to know yourselves.
In order to bring our contemporary life to a rational scale, the very
first what we need is to know the past and to be able to face it.

References

Those
passages from an early version of the book are not included in the
[printed version].